


Dinner. Not a date.

by PepperCat



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Ableism, Awkward Conversations, Curiousity, Dinner, Discussion of Bombs, Drinking, M/M, Not a Date, Pining, Tinnitus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 13:17:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperCat/pseuds/PepperCat
Summary: Hartley was looking forward to actually going out and talking to someone, and they can't make it. It's not unreasonable to ask Axel to fill in, right?





	Dinner. Not a date.

**Author's Note:**

> First: this fic does contain some ableism, with Axel commenting on Hartley's tinnitus, specifically doing that thing where people who don't have your problem suggest solutions to your problem that you've probably already thought of. (It's the kind of thing that I keep thinking of as offering kale, but that's not a useful filtering term.)
> 
> Second: I've fiddled with CodenameCarrot and La_Temperanza's excellent [How to Make iOS Text Messages on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845/chapters/14729722) fairly hard for the styling on this; if you're reading this on site, I'd really appreciate it if you could use the work skin and tell me how it looks. (I'm _especially_ interested in extra blank lines, text running into or over other text, etc.)

Thea cancelled just at the start of the afternoon. Hartley had already made the reservation, and eating alone was—

Usually it was fine, but it annoyed him to plan for something social and then have it not happen. He waited to see if the irritation would fade and it didn't, and since he was there with a schedule and a reservation _anyway_ it seemed foolish not to try to make use of it. And Roy and Mick were not exactly talkative, and Shawna was usually busy until late, and any extended conversation with Lisa was a game that she'd better win which could be engaging but was not exactly what he'd call relaxing.

(He didn't even want to think about the _and you're saying it's just dinner? really?_ look that Leonard Snart would give him if he got up the nerve to try.)

He went to the basement door and knocked, stood at the top of the steps and waited for Axel to push away from the workbench and glare up at him. "What?"

That did not seem like a good note on which to offer an invitation to dinner."You've been down here a while." A couple of days, actually, which Hartley could understand but which wasn't Axel's typical work schedule.

"You keeping track of me now?" The expression on Axel's face wasn't a smile, but there was definitely a hint of teeth.

"We both know you'd be offended if I suggested your presence _wasn't_ noticeable."

Axel sniffed, but his shoulders dropped a little and he looked satisfied, if not exactly pleased. "Yeah, I'd have to try harder."

"Thank goodness I'm not putting you to the trouble," Hartley said dryly, and apparently that counted as something like flattery because Axel made a sound that was a cross between a purr and a chuckle and got to his feet, stretching. The light from the workbench fell behind him as he did, and it made his expression harder to read. Hartley realized he could drop the whole thing, wrap up the conversation with a reminder that poker night was tomorrow and then leave, but while Axel wasn't exactly _easy_ company he was pretty familiar and usually had something to say and they'd eaten together before so—

"Do you want to go to dinner?" he said. "As my guest," and then, because he imagined it might be relevant and Axel was standing there with the light falling dimly across him and limning his arms from behind and would it _kill_ the man to wear a shirt with sleeves, really, "There's a dress code."

The light wasn't so bad that he missed it when Axel blinked.

"You asking me out, Pipes?" Voice aggressively bored, friendly as concrete.

"No," Hartley said. "I had a reservation. My friend can't make our meeting. I was looking forward to dinner and conversation and I wondered if you were free."

Axel barked a laugh. "I'm a backup plan for your friend ditching you?"

"I understand if you've got something better to do." Hartley was doing his level best to murder any hint of judgment in his voice. He thought it was working. "I just thought I'd ask." He'd be fine if Axel _didn't_ come, he was sure. It had just seemed like it would be simple.

Axel was looking between Hartley and the workbench, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Hartley shook his head to clear it and stepped back.

"In any case," he said, and then Axel interrupted.

"What the hell would we talk about, Piper?"

"Whatever you've been working on?" Hartley shrugged. "I generally trust you not to let it get too quiet." Axel grinned a little, quick sharp flick of teeth. "If you want to come, I'd ask you be decent to the staff. Jacket and tie isn't required, but please do wear a button-up shirt?"

"It doesn't have to be _white_ , does it?"

"I wouldn't presume."

"What kinda place?"

"Steakhouse over in Central," Hartley said. "I was going to leave in an hour."

* * *

Hartley had ordered wine. Axel had asked what was on tap like he was daring the server to look down on him, but she'd just started listing names and the edge was coming off Axel's smile.

The restaurant lights were tastefully dimmed, not too dark to see, not so bright the candles on the table were washed out. The wood of the furniture was dark; the walls were a cool grey, panelled in slightly roughened slate. There were lines of coppery metal incised into the walls, and the candles sat in copper-edged glass cubes. Hartley and Axel were sitting in one of the booths at the back—there was an installation on the wall nearby, water flowing down an artfully uneven slate wall into an underlit slot of a pool—and Hartley could feel the tension kinked into the sides of his neck start to loosen.

Thea had brought him here the first time. He hadn't wanted to go out, but he hadn't particularly objected, and he'd thought she'd just picked the place because the Arrowhead Grill was a somewhat referential name.

He didn't give her enough credit sometimes.

The server left. Hartley listened to her walk away, and lost track of the soft crush of footstep on carpet almost immediately. He held back a smile, and looked at Axel.

Plaid. Of course he was wearing plaid.

But it was dark blue and purple plaid, rather muted, and only his shirt, which was both button-up and buttoned. And the cargo pants were black, and he was only wearing one belt that was rather lacking in chromed hardware, and the studded bracelets were mostly hidden by the shirt cuffs.

Hartley wasn't saying a word about it. He'd never really gotten the knack of commenting on Axel's clothes without getting the other man's back up to begin with, and besides that the other man was a guest right now. Hartley was hardly going to be ruder than the waitstaff.

"Why'd your friend cancel?"

"Something came up with her family."

Axel seemed to accept that. "Why here?" He gestured around the room, and Hartley glanced at his menu and set it aside. "I'm not saying take her to the Din or anything, but there's okay places closer."

"It's a relaxing environment."

Axel snorted. "What's relaxing about a place you can't wear T-shirts?"

"I like the décor."

Axel slid his menu aside. "If you really cared about how the place looks—"

Hartley sniffed. He honestly expected Axel to roll right over the interjection, but the other man went stopped talking and looked at him like he had said something interesting, which was unexpected.

"Seriously?" Axel said, a little more quietly. Hartley wouldn't go so far as to call it thoughtful.

"Absolutely."

Axel looked around, frowning, and then snapped his fingers— a dry little clap of sound, no more. "The fountain?"

Hartley blinked.

"I mean—" Axel laughed a little and waved a hand at the room, leaned forward. "The water, right?"

It had been the reason Thea had dragged him here in the first place. That probably strengthened a palliative effect now—the moment he'd realized that Thea had been trying to find something that'd actually _help_ with the pain was a fond memory—but even setting aside emotional entanglement, it was undeniable that the sound of the water running down rock and splashing into the surface drowned out some of the screaming in his ears.

"Right," Hartley said. He was wondering who else would have figured it out. It wasn't that it was a _difficult_ conclusion, as long as you had some idea of how unpleasantly sharp his hearing was, and knew what white noise could do, and thought about him long enough to put the pieces together. But he didn't exactly share details of his hearing outside of the Rogues, these days. "The white noise helps—" He saw their server approaching. "Can we come back to this in a moment?"

Axel leaned back in the booth and put on a pleasant expression. Hartley didn't trust it as far as he could throw one of the chairs, but when the server brought their drinks and took their orders, she wasn't looking worried.

He hoped that the topic might have passed, but when she'd left with the menus Axel was still looking at him like he was interesting. "Why don't you come here more often?"

Hartley shrugged. "I'd rather not make a habit of it." Which was true, although it didn't get into the precise combination of wanting to minimize the odds of running into anyone who knew his parents and feeling skittish when he couldn't hear things coming for too long and disliking the transit time, since they weren't exactly in the heart of Keystone.

"Yeah, but..." Axel reached for one of the rolls on the table, cracked it open with his thumb and started buttering it. "If you like it, why—"

"I hardly think we came here to discuss this."

Axel's mouth shut abruptly and he dropped the bread on his sideplate and leaned back and— he wasn't quite glaring. Hartley would not have called it a glare. It was rather like the look he got when he took one of his books away from Coffee because she'd decided to gnaw on it.

Wonderful. The entrées hadn't even come yet, and he had a Trickster sulking at him.

"You the only one who gets to ask questions?" Axel said after a moment of awkward silence. He sounded angry. Hartley wasn't sure why, but he hadn't meant to cause it.

"No," he said, picking up his wine. "Just—" He thought of saying _I just get tired of explaining the obvious_ but while that was true it sounded sharper than he wanted to be right now. It was also true that the thought of breaking down everything in detail and serving it up to Axel Walker seemed exhausting and possibly a little stupid. "Don't tell me I'm that interesting to you," was what he settled on, and the faint edge in his voice, self-directed, was enough to make Axel smirk for a minute. "Coming here is a luxury, can we leave it at that?"

"Yeah." Axel shrugged. "It took like a month for me to get the word about your ears, Pipes," he said after a beat that Hartley would have called hesitation from anyone else. "You mad 'cause I'm curious, now?"

Well, when it was put like that...

"No," he said. "No, that's fine." And, because Axel was a guest and because he really did not want to sit here in grumbling awkwardness, he took a moment to make sure the edge was out of his voice and thought of how he'd speak to Thea and added "I'm sorry."

"Okay, so..." Axel finished the roll and picked up his beer. "Why don't you just... like, you've got earplugs, right?" Hartley made a circle in the air with the hand that wasn't holding his wine; _close enough, go on_. "Make them play background music, white noise, whatever." He laughed a little. "Get your own soundtrack."

"I don't like the idea of missing something."

Axel shrugged. "Set 'em up to broadcast from something with a switch? I dunno, you could use your phone? Kill it when you need to, but they could play anything."

No _earthly_ way Axel could know what he was describing.

"There are a few too many clever people in Central for me to be entirely comfortable with my earpieces picking up and playing configurable external input," Hartley said after a moment. His hands weren't moving, one on the stem of his wineglass and one resting still on the table. He was being careful and he was sure he wasn't reaching up to cover his own ears, wasn't even twitching. He was just... calm.

Axel's eyes brightened, but he didn't say anything, just repeated that soft laugh. "I guess." Hartley picked up his glass and drank. Sipped, really. It spared him from coming up with something else to say right then and there, and then Axel was looking at something on his phone. Which was enough to give Hartley breathing room to collect himself, but then the quiet settled in again and he wasn't sure how to break it.

He was willing to admit he'd lost the knack of smoothing over awkwardness. He'd been better at it, once, and now it felt consistently exhausting.

"Did you want to talk about what you were working on?" Which sounded distant, but at least not sharp, and Axel gave him a kind of lopsided grin.

"Sure, do you?"

"I did suggest it." He kept the bite out of his voice; he meant it as a reminder, not a rebuke.

Axel gave him a considering look. "You seriously wanna help."

"I would honestly hate to see you get frustrated," Hartley said dryly, and Axel laughed again.

"Yeah, well—"

The server came back, and Axel went quiet and smiled nicely at her. Hartley, who'd just imagined at least three very sharp responses Axel could whip out, was guiltily relieved. He honestly hadn't expected his request that Axel be decent to the waitstaff to be taken quite as seriously as it was apparently being. Admittedly Axel never mouthed off to Marisse at the Din, but Marisse was a different matter.

"Okay," Axel said, picking up knife and fork and starting on his steak. "Look, you actually know anything about—" and then he stopped talking, and after a moment Hartley let himself smile a little, but only while he was sipping wine to hide it.

"Dinner good?" he said mildly.

Axel, mouth full and one hand half-over it, muttered something appreciative and probably vulgar. Hartley nodded and went back to his own plate.

"The _hell_ did they do to that cow," Axel said after a moment.

Hartley shrugged. "Nothing I could duplicate. That's another reason I come here."

* * *

A guy has to wonder. He does. And Axel's thinking about asking, but it's _Piper_. If you tell Piper you don't believe something he's said, he gets pissy as hell. Not that Axel can't survive it, but Piper is smart and Axel is maybe not exactly stuck but something is definitely not working, so there is zero benefit to getting into an argument when he could at least be bouncing ideas off the guy instead. Especially since he's actually working on something he can't really see Piper objecting to.

So: okay. It's not a date. Guy comes looking for him and keeps flattering him and asks him out to dinner and offers to pay, but it's not a date.

(But it's, like, really not a date. Axel is pretty sure he would not miss it if Piper was angling to have things _go_ somewhere. So he chalks it up to Piper just being weird the way he sometimes is, and moves on.)

Once that's settled, it's not so bad. The beer is decent. And the wine when Piper suggests he try it is not as sour as what he's had before—this sort of velvet-rough feel all down his mouth and throat, colder than smoking, softer than rum and coke. And the food is fucking _spectacular_.

He's explaining things and maybe skipping some details or backtracking to fill others in—this isn't the kind of thing he _talks_ to other people about, and Jesse had advice but it was always around the edges of things and anyway that was written down so when Axel talked about things he had time to look it over and make sure it was all sorted out—but Piper is a good listener and either he picks up on things really well or Axel's pretty okay at explaining things and other people were just tuning him out. Whatever.

They've mostly finished the food and he's unfolded his napkin on the table to sort-of mark out the device and is tracing dents in it with the handle of his fork because he didn't think to break out a marker and anyway Pipes is following, and he's using the salt shaker and a bread roll and his empty glass to stand in for stuff, and Piper looks like he's actually paying attention. He's got his hand up and half-over his mouth, which is one of the things he does when he thinks he might get startled and doesn't want to show it if he is, but he's paying attention.

It's nice to get listened to, even Axel doesn't think his problem is exactly something you can _fix_.

* * *

"—can shape it, like I _need_ to shape it, I get that, non-negotiable. That part's cool. But I wanna reload it, right, and the detonator's wrecked every time."

Hartley can't recall Axel ever looking quite so disappointed over blowing something up before.

" _This_ is what you've been doing in the basement?"

Axel gave him a guarded look. "Yeah..."

Hartley bit his tongue over the first two things he wanted to say, and a third thing about gas lines, and went with "How big is this going to be?"

Axel calculated for a second. "Maybe a kilojoule? Ish?"

" _Kilo_ joule? One?" That was... well, Hartley wouldn't want to be standing next to it, but that seemed surprisingly tame for a Trickster. His own earpieces packed a bigger punch. But Axel's nod seemed to be in earnest (if slightly overenthusiastic, which Hartley was going to chalk up to the empty second bottle of wine), and it wasn't as if he couldn't go look in the basement himself if he wondered. "Alright," he said, "but that's the effect, how big is the device going to be?"

"Like—" Axel held out his hand, pinky extended. "Nail size or knuckle size. It's gotta be between the two. —I never leave it where your rats'd try to play with it," he added hastily. "But it needs a solid base, and I've _got_ one, that bit it's fine, and the detonator, but no way it survives the blast. And I can't just shape it around it, they've gotta be in contact, or it doesn't actually set it off and you don't _get_ it, when it's kinda the whole point—"

Hartley thought he was following the sense of things. He was a little proud of that, since _it_ was being used as a referent for, as far as he could tell, the explosive (bread roll), the explosion (hand waving), the detonator (salt shaker), something like wiring (indentations and finger-pointing), and whatever you called the thing that shaped the explosive charge (which he thought was the napkin).

"Can you make multiples of it and just use each one as necessary?" That... sort of fit. He thought. The explosive devices he'd heard of Axel using were generally destroyed when they were used, but he didn't seem, abstractly, to be against the broad concept of repeating a design...

"I want to reload it," Axel repeated, and Hartley took the patient breath of an engineer given unexplained designed specifications.

"For something reuseable, with the amount of energy involved," he said, finishing his wine, "have you considered a small-caliber rubber bullet? Your delivery system is reloadable, most of your design problems are already solved, you'd get better range—"

Axel looked offended. "I'm not _trying_ to use a gun." Hartley raised a hand in apology and nodded. "And I just— can't make it _work_ , okay?"

"Alright." Hartley leaned back for a moment, turning the stem of his wineglass in his fingers and enjoying the fact that he couldn't actually hear the squeak of glass on skin. "Alright, so don't."

If it had been anyone else, Hartley would have sworn Axel looked hurt. "Look, if the only thing you've got to say—"

Hartley shook his head, leaned forward, and with a slightly tipsy precision slid his plate under the napkin. Soft blots of greasy red began bleeding through the heavy weave, but the objects scattered across the napkin stayed in place. (The salt shaker _did_ tip onto its side, which he felt undermined the point, but he picked it up and set it back upright.)

Axel blinked.

"The device that sets off the blast doesn't need to be the component that directs the force released," Hartley said quietly. He wondered a little about pointing it out, but honestly thought Axel would have figured it out shortly. "Whatever sets off the blast, _that_ can be what gets burned out. Your— your cartridge?" Axel made a go-on motion with his hand, looking at the maquette on the table, and Hartley wasn't sure if that meant he'd stumbled onto the right term or Axel just didn't care. "That contains the detonator and whatever else you need. But to direct the energy, you put the whole thing into..." He really wasn't clear on the terminology. "The plate. Not the napkin."

"Yeah, but..." Axel trailed off.

"I mean, you might run into issues fitting the cartridge into the seating," Hartley said, "and I don't know what effect that would have, but—"

"I can fix that," Axel said. "I can—" His eyes widened; so did his smile. "Oh, hey. The baffles, I can— hey, you know a shop that can work titanium or something? I don't need to anchor stuff to it, I can go _all out_ on the liner— crystallization's gonna matter _way_ less— oh, _shit_ ," he was laughing, "cartridges!" He kept talking, but it was fast and fragmented and half to the plate at the center of the table, anyway, and Hartley didn't think he could have entirely followed even _without_ the white noise.

"Write it down," Hartley said, and Axel started taking pictures of the table with his phone, cackling softly to himself. It was like the sound of the water from the installation, but new and near enough that Hartley could actually notice it.

"Okay," Axel said. "Okay, I can _do_ this, I can—" He reached out to pick up his wineglass as he went on, bumped it so that it teetered on its base and he had to catch quickly at the stem to keep it from spilling. A couple of drops dribbled over the lip of the glass and began running down the outside, but that was all. Axel giggled.

"Maybe not _right_ now," Hartley said, and Axel nodded.

"Don't worry," he said, and when he patted Hartley's sleeve with his free hand—lightly, absently—Hartley didn't move. "Not gonna like this. 'S'okay. I _got_ it now."

"I must say," Hartley said after a minute, "I didn't expect that level of restraint from you."

"Hey," Axel said. "It's a bomb, Pipes." Or maybe he said _boom_ ; his speech was quick and loose and laughter was rolling under it, and Hartley couldn't swear to it being one or the other. "They're fun, but they're _serious_ fun, you know?"

"Not really."

Axel held his hands up towards Hartley and spread his fingers. "Count?"

"...what?"

Axel wiggled his fingers and laughed.

"Ten," Hartley said obediently.

"Right." Axel grinned. "Look, Pipes, 've seen what bombs can do if you're not careful since I was seven, you think I'd still have all these if I didn't know how to handle them?"

"Seven?" Hartley said, blinking at that and wanting to follow up, but Axel was already looking back at the arrangement on the table, picking up the detonator— the salt shaker and turning it over.

"Hey, do they do dessert here, right? It any good?"

"It's decent," Hartley said, and then before he could second-guess himself, "Have you ever had port?"

* * *

Chocolate cake and tawny port was not exactly the most delicate of combinations, but it was nothing to complain about. Axel was not-quite-laughing softly to himself, a cacchinating beat in his breath that Hartley could hear now that they were outside. Between the anchoring weight of the food and the evening of drinks, he felt both warm and light, comfortably relaxed, glad of the company...

Happy, really, if you wanted to summarize it.

"Okay," Axel said, and a giggle chased after the words, something that through the softening of wine and port just sounded pleased. "Okay, but Pipes, where'd you learn that? Any of that?"

Hartley thought of designing devices that could reliably contain and direct the forces generated within them. Part of that—not the part that had ended up causing problems—had been maintaining useful distinctions between different parts of the apparatus. It had made repairs and replacements easier.

"Oh, you know," he said a little distantly. "Physics. You study a lot of force and stress. It comes up."

"Mhmmm." Axel was grinning, which was one of those things that technically Hartley felt you should keep an eye on but just seemed nice right about now. "Okay." He ran one hand back through his hair, a sound like silk over falling leaves. "Okay. You wanna head somewhere and grab a drink? Keep going?"

There was a heartbeat or two, then, when getting drunk with a Trickster and coming up with plans for bombs didn't sound like a terrible idea.

Hartley opened his mouth, and then all his long habits of consideration caught up with him and gave him pause, and he stepped back from the offer.

"I'll have to pass," he said. "I'm getting tired." It was calm and sensible and it sounded like he didn't _really like_ how the evening had gone, and he tried to come up with something other than flirting to soften the words. It was just that the _company_ had been nice, was all. "Maybe— maybe some other time?"

"Some other time," Axel said, and he put his arm lightly across Hartley's shoulders and steered him out of the way of a couple walking down the sidewalk and towards the street. "'kay then. Come on, call it a night."

* * *

After they got in Axel sprawled himself along the couch and turned on a movie and started scribbling out ideas, ballpoint pen scratches and cartoons that Hartley hated to admit would actually be useable blueprints. Not just now, probably, but he'd seen the ones Axel turned out when he was sober, and they were perfectly workable dynamic schematics, cartoonish but clear. The other man would probably get started on things tomorrow morning, or more likely noon if he stayed up late.

It hadn't been what he was planning on, but it had been a good evening.

Hartley changed into pyjamas and sat down in his room to read before sleeping but the words didn't quite hold his attention. They took a little too much concentration right now.

He imagined that if Axel was wrapped up in sketching, he could go to the living room and take over the remote, put on something familiar and enjoyable until he was actually tired. He didn't think Axel would mind; the man usually seemed happier with some kind of background noise going.

And yet.

He turned over his own reluctance but couldn't source it. It was a practical idea. He could get his housecoat, get Axel to move over, sit down next to him on the couch and just put on something easy to watch, familiar, absorbing enough to unwind into. And look over occasionally when Axel was laughing about whatever conjunction of wire and frame was amusing him.

He remembered Axel's smile over dinner. Not angry, not with an edge to it, the way most of the ones he remembered were. It would be very stupid to forget that when Axel smiled he was showing teeth, and Hartley tried not to be stupid, he _did_. But those smiles over dinner had just looked _pleased_ , interested and happy and alight and...

The memory was so much easier to focus on than the words on the page in front of him.

"Oh," Hartley said softly to himself. "Oh, _fantastic_."

He set the book down on his nightstand and reached for his phone.

**Hartley:** Thea?

**Hartley:** I'm a fool.

It took a while for her to answer. Less time than he'd worried. Apparently the trouble had cleared up some in the last several hours.

**Thea:** No you aren't, Hart.

**Hartley:** I am making up things that I would never say.

and that wasn't true, that wasn't _quite_ true. The part of him that always sat back and watched knew that nothing that had happened could warrant that particular Siken reference; it's only the wine giving a melancholy weight to the talk and the fading press of Axel's hand on his shoulder, not even _real_ but through a layer of cloth, an afterimage of sensation like the fading imprint of looking at the sun. It's a lot of silly surface things to be dazzled by. It's a passing thought to entertain him while he sits alone on his narrow bed with nothing touching his skin but dry clothes and empty air.

**Hartley:** It's nothing. I know it's nothing. Even if anything happened it would still be nothing.

**Thea:** Oh, hon.

**Thea:** What's his name?

**Hartley:** I'm still not telling you.

**Thea:** Hartley.

**Thea:** Are you doing anything about it tonight?

**Hartley:** I am doing nothing about it ever.

he answered. He remembers Axel's teeth set in the angry curl of his mouth after the liquor store, and further back he remembers blood in the sink and _you don't get to touch me_. As if it was a privilege so rarely given. But he's the only one who's gotten _that_ particular restriction slapped on him, and he's abided by it. Meanwhile everyone else can shove Axel aside or put a hand on his arm or back and get interest and response in kind. Hartley just looks at him and hears the blood moving under his skin, sees that peculiar quickness that isn't quite grace, hollow of throat and bare arms and—

That smile, turned on Hartley like he'd been an answer and a wonder wrapped up together.

_You don't get to touch me._

**Hartley:** He's not interested or staying.

Seeing that set out so clearly helped; harsh truth in undeniable sans-serif font. It hurt, but it was a clean hurt, not the slow dragging ache of a stupid distraction. Hartley pushed his glasses up and rubbed at his eyes.

**Hartley:** He was just good to talk to tonight.

**Hartley:** I'm not doing anything, Thea. I promise.

**Thea:** I'm sorry I couldn't make it.

**Hartley:** It's ok. I get it. Someone needs to keep an eye on Oliver.

**Hartley:** Everyone's doing well, I hope?

**Thea:** It was nowhere near the worst night we've ever had.

she replied. Hartley sniffed out something like a laugh.

**Hartley:** I'm glad you successfully cleared that extremely low bar.

**Thea:** We would have to go digging to not clear that bar.

**Hartley:** I put nothing past your brother.

**Thea:** So few people do! ;)

That was a gentler response than his digs at Oliver Queen usually got, which meant she was cutting him slack. Words blinked up, bright and steady, as Thea started talking about rescheduling and arranging plans for later. It was something to pay attention to, a distraction, and Hartley understood that that was at least part of why she was doing it.

He appreciated it, in the moment. This particular flavour of loneliness was always easier when he had something to focus on, and he let the small glowing screen and the words scrolling up it distract him for a moment.

All he needed was a moment, he was sure. He'd be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> The Siken reference Hartley's thinking of is to "[Meanwhile](http://april-is.tumblr.com/post/87908501/april-23-2007-meanwhile-richard-siken)", a poem that is about... well, permanence and progression, among other things. It is, he feels, not _actually_ applicable to his relationship with Axel.
> 
> (And as this is either the third or fourth time I have referenced the liquor store events in my fic, I suppose I should probably write them out.)
> 
> Am over at peppersandcats on Tumblr. :)


End file.
